Communications over wired and wireless links are subject to degradation as a result of electromagnetic interference, changes to propagation characteristics of the transmission media, transmission losses, and synchronization errors. Packets transmitted from one device therefore commonly contain errors upon receipt at their intended destination, and/or fail to be received at the destination.
A number of network protocols have been designed in order to minimize the loss of data during transmission. For example, networks conforming to Long Term Evolution (LTE) protocols use a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) error-control method to maximize information throughput. HARQ methods use a combination of error correction coding and repeat requests to provide almost lossless communication links. In particular, HARQ maximizes the possibility of errorless delivery of data packets over the air interface by repeating the packets that are received with errors.
Different applications have different requirements for the data received over wired and wireless communication links. For example, real-time voice or video communication applications can maintain conversational audio/video quality without requiring lossless or errorless delivery of audio/video packets. However, the real-time voice or video communication applications may be sensitive to delay. Such applications may therefore not require repetition of all lost or erroneous audio packets, and repetition of such packets may cause inefficient use of an LTE communication link. In contrast, file transfer applications are generally sensitive to packet loss but insensitive to delay. Such applications may therefore rely on repetition of all lost or erroneous audio packets to ensure lossless reception of all packets across the LTE communication link.
In order to make efficient use of communication links and improve the information carrying capacity of such links, systems and methods are therefore needed to control the re-transmission of packets based on characteristics of the transmitted information.